Senior Data Engineer: Scale & Architect Platforms

Ultimate.ai; Austin (TX); Hybrid; USD 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work environment

Job summary

Zendesk is seeking a Senior Staff Data Engineer to lead the design, development, and scaling of our enterprise data platform. You will partner with architects, engineers, analysts, and stakeholders to ensure reliable, observable, secure, and governed data services and pipelines.

This role blends data architecture with engineering execution while remaining hands-on with data platforms. You will drive end-to-end analytics solutions, mentor engineers, and establish engineering best practices across

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or related field.
• 10+ years of experience in data engineering, data architecture, or distributed systems, with at least 5 years in technical leadership roles.
• 7+ years of data engineering experience building and maintaining scalable data platforms.
• 5+ years of experience with Cloud columnar databases (Snowflake, Google BigQuery, etc).
• 3+ years of production experience with dbt and modern ELT pipelines.
• Experience with Airflow, Snowflake, Fivetran, dbt, AWS, GitHub Actions, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform.
• Hands-on experience with AWS services (S3, Glue, EMR, Athena, Snowpipe, Kubernetes, Terraform).
• Understanding of data governance, security controls, and access management.
• Solid experience in observability, alerting, and incident management for data systems.
• Ability to mentor staff and senior engineers and work with cross-functional teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead data engineering projects at scale across multiple teams.
• Plan and deliver complex, multi-team projects with external dependencies.
• Own large, mission-critical systems from design to operation.
• Collaborate across teams to explore technical solutions.
• Design end-to-end analytics solutions for customer 360, finance, product and sales domains.
• Establish engineering best practices and mentor engineers.
• Identify and implement internal process improvements in data delivery.

Skills

Data engineering

Data architecture

Cloud computing

Python

Leadership

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in CS/Data Science/related

Tools

Snowflake

dbt

Airflow

AWS

Kubernetes

Terraform

Fivetran

Tableau/Looker

Job description

Zendesk is seeking a Senior Staff Data Engineer to lead the design, development, and scaling of our enterprise data platform. You will partner with architects, engineers, analysts, and stakeholders to ensure reliable, observable, secure, and governed data services and pipelines.

This role blends data architecture with engineering execution while remaining hands-on with data platforms. You will drive end-to-end analytics solutions, mentor engineers, and establish engineering best practices across